What is awareness?

what is awareness?

Can awareness be conditioned? Is there an awareness which is not conditioned?

Is this the same question as who are we really? or not?

what are we looking for?

We were having a dialogue today. Three people. Many silences between the spoken language. We were trying to taste non-intellectually the different subjects that came out during the dialogue.

We were reading a chapter of J. Krishnamurti´s "Freedom from the known". Each one of us read a paragraph, very very slowly. And from time to time we paused to talk about what was read.

At one point K said: "...for most people love means comfort, security, a guarantee for the rest of their life of continuous emotional satisfaction"

And one of us asked "what does it mean to you "continuous emotional satisfaction"?".
And another answered something, and in his response mentioned the word "pleasure".
And the third said: "we have been conditioned during thousands of years to take pleasure as good and desirable, and pain as bad and avoidable. What is the full extension of this conditioning?"......
Another one added: "how is it that there is something in all human beings that make us always look for something, do something, search for something?"....


(photograph: Transiting the Sun: NASA space shuttle Atlantis is seen in silhouette during solar transit, Tuesday, May 12, 2009, from Florida. This image was made before Atlantis and the crew of STS-125 had grappled the Hubble Space Telescope. Image Credit: NASA/Thierry Legault)

How do we see reality?

We were talking about Kepler´s work, and having a look at his work and contribution to our understanding of the motion of planets around the sun.



Kepler was not seeing the reality because he had already an image of how the universe should be: if it was God´s creation it had to reflect the "perfection" of the creator, so the orbits should have the "perfection" of the circles.........

We live according to what we see, we interpret things according to how we see them, we act according to what we beleive.........

But......How do we see things? do we see them as images? can an image ever be free from the influence of the person that makes the image? have we ever questioned how we see, the process of seeing? is there a perception which is pure, which is a direct perception? do we "tell" reality how it has to be?............questions........

These questions were also relevant in the "social environment" that surrounded Kepler´s life:



(videos from Carl Sagan´s Cosmos series)

Who are we?

And a dialogue between a visitor and Nisagardatta Maharaj:

Questioner: I have come from England and I am on my way to Madras. There I shall meet my father and we shall go by car overland to London. I am to study psychology, but I do not yet know what I shall do when I get my degree. I may try industrial psychology, or psychotherapy. My father is a general physician. I may follow the same line. But this does not exhaust my interests. There are certain questions which do not change with time. I understand you have some answers to such questions and this made me come to see you.

Nisagardatta Maharaj: I wonder whether I am the right man to answer your questions. I know little about things and people. I know only that I am, and that much you also know. We are equals.

Q: Of course I know that I am. But I do not know what it means.

M: What you take to be the ‘I’ in the ‘I am’ is not you. To know that your are is natural, to know what you are is the result of much investigation. You will have to explore the entire field of consciousness and go beyond it. For this you must find the right teacher and create the conditions needed for discovery. Generally speaking, there are two ways: external and internal. Either you live with somebody who knows the Truth and submit yourself entirely to his guiding and molding influence, or you seek the inner guide and follow the inner light wherever it takes you. In both cases your personal desires and fears must be disregarded. You learn either by proximity or by investigation, the passive or the active way. You either let yourself be carried by the river of life and love represented by your Guru, or you make your own efforts, guided by your inner star. In both cases you must move on, you must be earnest. Rare are the people who are lucky to find somebody

worthy of trust and love. Most of them must take the hard way, the way of intelligence and understanding, of discrimination and detachment (viveka-vairagya). This is the way open to all.

Q: I am lucky to have come here: though I am leaving tomorrow, one talk with you may affect my entire life.

M: Yes, once you say ‘I want to find Truth,’ all your life will be deeply affected by it. All your mental and physical habits, feelings and emotions, desires and fears, plans and decisions will undergo a most radical transformation.

Q: Once I have made up my mind to find The Reality, what do I do next?

M: It depends on your temperament. If you are earnest, whatever way you choose will take you to your goal. It is the earnestness that is the decisive factor.

Q: What is the source of earnestness?

M: It is the homing instinct, which makes the bird return to its nest and the fish to the mountain stream where it was born. The seed returns to the earth, when the fruit is ripe. Ripeness is all.

Q: And what will ripen me? Do I need experience?

M: You already have all the experience you need, otherwise you would not have come here. You need not gather any more, rather you must go beyond experience. Whatever effort you make, whatever method (sadhana) you follow, will merely generate more experience, but will not take you beyond. Nor will reading books help you. They will enrich your mind, but the person you are will remain intact. If you expect any benefits from your search, material, mental or spiritual, you have missed the point. Truth gives no advantage. It gives you no higher status, no power over others; all you get is truth and the freedom from the false.

Q: Surely truth gives you the power to help others.

M: This is mere imagination, however noble! In truth you do not help others, because there are no others. You divide people into noble and ignoble and ask the noble to help the ignoble. You separate, you evaluate, you judge and condemn—in the name of truth you destroy it. Your very desire to formulate truth denies it, because it cannot becontained in words. Truth can be expressed only by the denial of the false—in action. For this you must see the false as false (viveka) and reject it (vairagya). Renunciation of the false is liberating and energizing. It lays open the road to perfection.

(Nisargadatta, in the book “I am That”)

sufism

She was an elderly lady, blind for several years, dignified, humble, kind, with a reverence for the world, a joy for life and a deep respect for others.....she was a sufi, and the descendant of a long chain of sufis.....

I asked her: "what is sufism?"
And she answered: "Sufism is union"....
I did not asked "union with what?"...as in that moment I knew clearly, and at the same time hazily, what she meant......


A beautiful scene of a beautiful film, Bab´Aziz, a sufi story......





Rumi's poetry is essentially about tawhid – union with his beloved (the primal root) from which/whom he has been cut off and become aloof – and his longing and desire to come back to it.

THE WORM'S WAKING

This is how a human can change:
there's a worm addicted to eating
grape leaves.

Suddenly, he wakes up,
call it grace,whatever,
something wakes him,
and he's no longer a worm.

He's the entire vineyard,
and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks,
a growing wisdom and joy
that doesn't need
to devour.

Rumi

contexts

Dr. P.W., a scientist, joins our dialogue group for a couple of dialogues.
He talks to us about the multiple "influences" on the fetus during pregnancy, like the stress of the mother, nutrition, chemicals, etc.....

His words inspire in us the feeling of the tremendous number and multiple forms of the influences we receive while being a fetus and the influence of all these in our future life....

We also get a "feeling" that these "influences" come also from a long evolutionary past......that we are the result of an incredibly long chain of influences during the evolution of the species......and that we are not aware of them, but that they are still "acting" right now.......

This brought about the feeling that we are not aware of this "context", the extent of the context of the past, still "working" today.....

And on the same line, we became aware of how unaware we are of another "context", the context of the present......everything that is happening right now in the whole universe.....an explosion of activity and creativity....millions and millions and millions of things happening at this very moment........our "context" in the present....

Is our awareness very "local", circumscribed to a small radius around us?
If we were to be more aware of the immense context of the past and of the present, would our concept of the "me" change?...........